Fenech's fighting words at the Belvoir St Theatre

"TOUGH times don't last, tough people do."

Im your man

"TOUGH times don't last, tough people do."

Jeff Fenech's inspirational scrawl on the wall of Sydney's Belvoir St Theatre is still drying as the actors in Roslyn Oades's latest play mill about, ducking, weaving, skipping, sweating.

"I wrote (the cast) a little message," Fenech says. "(It's) something I have always believed in, and I hope it inspires them."

The three-time world champion and former trainer of Mike Tyson is watching a rehearsal of I'm Your Man, Oades's boxing-based play, which premieres at Sydney Festival next month.

'We're all a little excited," says Oades, stepping over a spit bucket in Belvoir's Downstairs Theatre, which has been transformed into a boxing gym, complete with punching bags and speedballs hanging from the ceiling. "The boys were a bit nervous, I think. But Jeff seemed really moved by the show."

Fenech is one of a host of Sydney fighters whose stories make up the play, the third in Oades's trilogy of "headphone-verbatim", paperless script works, in which actors repeat the pre-recorded speech of real-life subjects. Oades spent 18 months in trainer Billy Hussein's boxing gym in Lakemba, in Sydney's outer west, interviewing young amateurs and legends of the sport such as Fenech and Tony Mundine.

The recordings are piped into the actors' headpieces during the show and the cast of four recites the speech, flaws and all.

One boxer Oades followed closely is Sydney's Billy Dib. Her interviews with him range from his unassuming days in Hussein's gym all the way to the night of his world title fight (where Oades found herself "the only non-card girl in the ring") in Sydney's Homebush in July this year. Dib's journey is played out in I'm Your Man by 25-year-old Mohammed Ahmad. "I did a lot of amateur boxing when I was 18," he says over a salad sandwich and fruit salad. "And this is just as gruelling. We are eating healthily, and training very hard. I haven't been this fit since I was young and fighting twice a week."

The National Theatre of Scotland and Frantic Assembly bring to the festival Beautiful Burnout, a theatre-dance work also about boxing.